Mass Tort Marketing (The Ultimate Guide)
- Updated: March 21, 2023
Quick Links
- What’s the difference between marketing for mass tort cases and general law firm marketing?
- What are the first steps you should take to market for mass tort clients?
- Identify your law firm’s brand
- Optimize your website
- Practice areas in mass tort cases:
- Choosing Your Practice Area
- Determine Your Ideal Client
- Decide If You Want a Digital Marketing Campaign, Traditional Marketing Campaign, or Both
- Digital Marketing Campaigns:
- Traditional Marketing Campaigns:
- Set Your Goals
- Marketing Strategies for Mass Tort Cases
- Digital Marketing Campaigns
- Traditional Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Advantages of Content Marketing
- Disadvantages of Content Marketing
- Should I use a lead generation company?
- Advantages of Lead Generation Companies
- Disadvantages of Lead Generation Companies
- What should I look for when outsourcing mass tort marketing services?
Law firms highly desire mass tort litigation because it can be very profitable, and more personal injury firms are adding mass tort cases to their portfolio. According to the National Trial Lawyers Organization, mass tort cases made up over 36% of the federal civil docket in 2017.
Marketing in the legal profession can be difficult. According to the American Bar Association, there are 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S. Therefore, competition is exceptionally high, and law firms must be aggressive in their marketing efforts to prove their value among competitors and reach qualified leads that may be skeptical of their services.
The best practices to reach potential leads necessitate investing more time, money, and resources. This article provides approaches and recommendations to effectively and ethically market for mass tort cases.
What’s the difference between marketing for mass tort casesand general law firm marketing?
Recruiting clients for mass tort cases may be problematic, as they might wrongfully believe they would need to share any compensation awarded with a larger group, therefore opting for individual representation. While this is the case in class action lawsuits, it’s not the same with tort cases. Thus, to successfully recruit clients for mass tort cases, law firms may need to make a concerted effort to educate clients on the benefits of mass tort litigation as part of their marketing strategy.
What are the first steps you should take to market for mass tort clients?
Educate yourself on the issue
Identify your ideal clientele
After these initial preparatory steps, consider the following essential strategies:
- How do we want people to view our firm?
- What kind of expertise do we have on which we can capitalize?
- How do we convey trust, value, and quality?
- What voice, style and image do we want to convey, and how can we do so effectively?
Choosing Your Practice Area
Recruiting clients for mass tort cases may be problematic, as they might wrongfully believe they would need to share any compensation awarded with a larger group, therefore opting for individual representation. While this is the case in class action lawsuits, it’s not the same with tort cases. Thus, to successfully recruit clients for mass tort cases, law firms may need to make a concerted effort to educate clients on the benefits of mass tort litigation as part of their marketing strategy.
Practice areas in mass tort cases:
Pharmaceuticals
Consumer products
Pharmaceuticals
Consumer products
Catastrophic personal injury
Sexual abuse and assault
Medical devices, products & implants
Catastrophic personal injury
Sexual abuse and assault
Medical devices, products & implants
Determine Your Ideal Client
For example, suppose you’re recruiting child sex abuse clients against the Boys Scouts of America. In that case, your client profile could be males between a certain age (calculate the age range by researching when BSA started, how old the victims would be today and the current minimum age of children who join BSA today) who have suffered physically, emotionally, or financially from the abuse they experienced.
After identifying your ideal clientele, you can develop an internal marketing funnel to better analyze client behavior to help turn your website visitors into clients. A marketing funnel is an inbound process that captures a client’s journey from finding your firm to hiring you as their attorney and includes three phases:
Awareness
Consideration
Decision
Taking the time to build a client profile proactively can help you generate quality leads on an ongoing basis. This long-term strategy can save you the time and resources you may otherwise waste creating multiple ad-hoc client recruitment campaigns that may attract a lower quality of clients.
Decide If You Want a Digital Marketing Campaign, Traditional Marketing Campaign, or Both
There are many digital and traditional marketing campaigns that you can employ, but your client profile should help dictate your choice. You can and should use both forms of marketing to expand your reach after careful consideration of your target clientele.
For example, suppose your target clientele is millennials. In that case, you might focus most of your marketing efforts on social media but still air television or radio ads during peak hours or programs popular with millennials. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. It’s dynamic and based on factors included in your client profile such as age, occupation, schedule, hobbies, etc.
Forms of digital and traditional marketing include:
Digital Marketing Campaigns:
- Websites
- SEO
- Paid Search (Google Ads)
- Legal blogs and directories
- Social media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Email campaigns
- Any use of digital platforms
Traditional Marketing Campaigns:
- Billboards
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Radio
- Word of mouth
Set Your Goals
Identifying your metrics
- Consumption Metrics: How much prospective clients interact with your content (i.e., website visits, clicks on shared links, emails opened, downloads, etc.)
- Sharing Metrics: Quantity and frequency of your content shared
- Engagement Metrics: How much time users spend engaging in your content (i.e., time spent reading, number of sessions, comments, and likes)
- Retention Metrics: How many users subscribed or unsubscribed, followed or unfollowed, and returned to your content
- Lead Metrics: How many leads have been generated (i.e., form submissions, phone calls, emails, etc.). You can use this information to determine cost-per-lead, which is the cost spent acquiring a lead compared to the number of leads generated.
- Sales Metrics: How many new clients you’ve signed as a result of all your marketing efforts. Comparing the total number of clients signed to your entire marketing costs will determine your cost-per-client.
- Cost Goals: Comparing each marketing piece’s production, distribution, and promotion costs compared to the cost of your entire marketing strategy
Determining measurement tools
You can use the results from your measuring tools to conduct a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis of your marketing plan. You should implement strategies to re-evaluate, pivot, and optimize your marketing efforts accordingly.
Marketing Strategies for Mass Tort Cases
Digital Marketing Campaigns:
Digital ads should always redirect the user to your website, specifically to the portion that relates to their query. For example, if a user clicks on your ad about a recalled drug, the link should direct them to the part of your website about pharmaceutical lawsuits.
- Pay per click ads: Ads that you pay for when people click on them
- Cost per lead: The cost spent acquiring a lead compared to the number of leads generated determines how cost-effective your marketing strategy is
- Cost per action: An ad that you only pay for when the user takes a specific agreed-upon action, allowing you to control your advertising costs to align with your marketing end goals. For example, you may only pay the advertiser if a user signs up for your newsletter or submits a query form.
- Social networking (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
- Photo/Video sharing (e.g., Instagram, YouTube, Facebook Live, Snapchat, Pinterest, Vimeo)
- Microblogging (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr)
- Google ads: Pay-per-click ads seen at the top of your Google search and displayed on websites that are not search engines
- Display network: Background ads unrelated to a user’s activity
- Search ads: Ads placed on web pages based on results from a user’s search
SEO factors in your ideal client profile and your firm’s areas of practice to promote your services to clients who are likely to need your legal services and are more likely to take action.
Traditional Marketing
TV commercials
Radio commercials
Billboards
Newspapers
Content Marketing
- Articles and blog posts
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Emails
- Newsletters
- Webinars
- Infographics
- It can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing.
- Creating quality content increases user engagement, thereby increasing your website traffic.
- Quality educational content makes a good impression on users and increases your company’s trustworthiness and reputation.
- It optimizes your SEO by showing search engines that your website is active.
- Delivering high-quality content consistently is time-consuming.
- It requires consistency. Once you’ve built momentum and an audience base, failing to provide the same quality content can lead to user disengagement.
- It requires creativity and skills. Your content must compete with the copious amount of content available online. It must be engaging and creative, including blog writing, web design, video editing, and other skills.
- It requires variety. Coming up with versatile and relevant topics continually can be challenging.
- It can be difficult to establish metrics to measure results from your content marketing.
Should I use a lead generation company?
- They have staff with expertise in SEO, graphic design, analytics, social media strategy, branding, copy-writing, and other areas that your firm may be lacking in.
- You don’t have to spend time making cold calls.
- They can boost your online visibility.
- They can help reduce “closing time” or the period from when a client shows interest to the moment they sign on as a client.
- They can provide marketing automation software or help optimize your existing software.
- They can help you stay current on market trends that may otherwise exhaust many of your resources.
- You’ll have limited control and visibility over the source of leads. You may not know or be able to verify if leads are ethically sourced, which can be particularly concerning for a law firm.
- Hiring a third-party company increases your marketing budget.
- Return on Investment (ROI) can be low. The company may not deliver a satisfactory number or quality of leads.
- They are not as familiar with the law, your firm, or your services. Therefore, the methods and tone that the company employs to generate leads may not appeal to prospective clients.
What should I look for when outsourcing mass tort marketing services?
Verify that the company has actual people vetting leads rather than auto-generated leads of sub-par quality. Also, make sure to have an efficient, streamlined process that allows you to call leads within five minutes of receiving them or have a system in place to remind you to follow up multiple times if you cannot reach them the first time.
If you don’t have a call center and you’re outsourcing that service, ensure that the company has accurate reporting tools for inbound calls received to help you determine if your marketing campaign is working or if there are issues with an intake that need addressing.
You should look for the following qualities in an outsourcing company:
- They have effective and timely communication skills.
- They understand your brand, your ideal clients, and your goals.
- They are proven to go beyond the lead to help you improve your signing rate.
- They use current tracking and analytics software.
- They have a simple retainer process.